Henry Samuel is the Telegraph's France correspondent and has been living and working in the country for 12 years.

Culture lifts French gloom

The European Commission may have just announced a severe euro zone recession for 2009, but here's something to lift France out of its current gloom: the good times are rolling for French culture – in particular for art exhibitions and film.

Figures for museum attendance in France reached record highs in several cases last year. The Louvre attracted a staggering 8.5 million visitors – 200,000 more than in 2007. Admissions have rocketed 67 per cent since 2001. I wonder how the museum will cope with the even larger crowds it can expect following Nicolas Sarkozy's decision last week to end entrance fees for under 25s to national museums.

One of the cultural smash hits turned out to be the storming of Versailles by America's "king of kitsch," Jeff Koon's, whose exhibition brought in one million visitors – a record for the palace of the Sun King. A failed last-ditch court bid by Louis XIV's direct heir to rid the royal palace of Koon's Lobster, Pink Panther and Michael Jackson and Bubbles only increased the show's allure.

The Pompidou Centre, meanwhile, had an excellent year, attracting 2.75 million visitors, a rise of more than six per cent, while visits to the various museums run by the Paris town hall rose by a third to three million.

Given this rosy picture, it seemed a bit rich of Sarkozy to accuse Paris' mayor Bertrand DelanoÃ« last Wednesday of reducing Paris culture to Les Nuits Blanches – the annual all-night contemporary arts fest around the capital – and Paris Plages, which turns the banks of the Seine into a sandy beach over the summer.

He did so in a speech on culture in which he announced his intention to create a museum of the history of France, to reinforce "French identity" – a subject that has already got him into hot water. Like all self-respecting French presidents, he wants a cultural monument to himself. The idea for the museum – likely to be situated in les Invalides, the military hospital complex near the Eiffel Tower which houses Napoleon's tomb – has drawn a lukewarm, and in some cases hostile response from historians. "I don't see the use simply because Paris is (already) an immense museum of the history of France," said historian Alain Decaux.

Returning to French cultural success, the movie industry had a cracking year in 2008, when French films overtook American fare in market share for only the second time in 22 years (45.7 per cent of the market versus 44.5 for the Americans). This progression, unique in Europe, was largely down to two huge successes: Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis, a good-natured (but in my opinion vastly overrated) comedy about a French southerner who discovers the freezing but warm-hearted north. It became the most successful French film ever; the woeful Asterix at the Olympic Games came second.

Today there is yet more encouraging news: the box office figures for French-made films seen outside France are just coming in and look certain to surpass 80 million admissions – a first since Unifrance, the body which promotes French film, started gathering such data 15 years ago.

In one important way these foreign-screened figures are not a success: all of the biggest hitters were shot in English with "Anglo-Saxon" stars, somewhat taking the gloss off the "made in France" veneer; the biggest crowd-puller was Mathieu Kassovitz's A.D. Babylon staring Vin Diesel, with more than 10 million admissions worldwide.

But there were francophone triumphs too, including Guillaume Canet's thriller Ne le dis a personne (Tell no one) and Il y a longtemps que je t'aime (I've loved you so long) with Kristin Scott Thomas. Cannes Golden Palm winner Entre les murs (The Class) has got off to a strong start. The film about life in the classroom in a tough, multicultural neighbourhood of Paris (not far from where I am writing) has been shortlisted for a foreign-language film Oscar nomination.

Moving away from a narrow definition of art and entertainment to the wider art de vivre, the French have equally strong reasons to see la vie en rose, they have just cemented their place as Europe's baby champions, with a fertility rate for 2008 of 2.02 children per couple.